According to industry data, the size of the RPG handheld game market in Europe and the United States is $4.7 billion, of which the best performance is the “Raid: Shadow Legends (RAID Shadow Legends)” released by Plarium. Speaking of this game
So what exactly does this RPG do? What are the trends of turn-based RPG handheld games? GameRefinery recently spoke with Nicholas Day, Plarium’s vice president of creative, to talk more about the game and the company’s R&D and operational strategies.
Meta Trends in Medium and Casual Games
GameRefinery: First of all, meta-trends are a very broad topic, depending on what perspective we use, but if we just look at the trends we’ve seen, the market has escalated differently in different categories, especially in the medium game category, for example, there are already a lot of RPGs.
Looking at the casual sector, super casual games are gradually adding more meta elements, and more and more products are embracing the “hybrid casual” model, using a mix of in-buys and IAAs to cash in.
The more classic cases are “Legend of Bow and Arrow”, “Art of War” and “Mr Autofire”, we can see RPG elements. If we look at recent trends, especially at the head of the market, we can see that multiple puzzle games are starting to adopt this strategy. One of the biggest breakout hits last year was probably Zen Match, published by Good Job Games, which is essentially a card mahjong game with very simple core gameplay, but adds decoration gameplay as a progression system on top of that, but made a little lighter than many casual games. This combination of gameplay can attract a larger amount of users, and now the game has also entered the Top 100 best-seller list in the United States.
Lion Studios’ Match 3D uses a similar strategy, with its simple gameplay in which you combine two similar items in a large pile, within a time limit. However, the game also adds a heavier social element, adding a guild system and touring competitive events right off the bat, which not only becomes the Meta element of the game, but also an actual means of cashing in.
If we compare the two games with last year’s brightest triple elimination game, Royal Match, we can find that the latter incorporates almost all the elements mentioned above, it has a Zen Match-style progress system, adds a Match 3D-like social framework and event system, and now Royal Match has become the top two for the US triple elimination handicap category It became the biggest dark horse last year.
Collecting Play Trends
The last thing I want to highlight is the collectible play and collectible elements in these games, especially in board games and Slots. In the past year, especially in the post-IDFA era, many old games, especially board games, are niche games for loyal players of board or Slots, and it is difficult for new products to break through. How do you keep players in the game over the past two years when many of the headline games have added collection systems? Basically, these systems just add seasons, and then you offer a variety of items for players to collect.
As these collections are completed, players can be rewarded. This design doesn’t have to affect game play, but it can give players a sense of progress each season, rather than just letting them spend or spin Slots. borrowing interesting features from more categories is a very good innovation, and this trend of category integration will continue.
Nicholas Day.
Plarium, a subsidiary of Aristocrat, has been acquired for many years, and our first handheld hit was Vikings: War of Clans, developed by our Kransnodar studio, which is still doing well and has a lot of players. Then we started to transition into handheld games and became a handheld-based company, and we started to move into casual, action and RPG games, and we released a lot of games, the most successful one being Raid: Legends of Shadow, which you may have seen in some advertising platforms.
This game has actually been released for several years, and we’re coming up on our third anniversary, with the summer 2021 release of Mech Arena, a 5V5 shooter, both of which have become our flagship games today.
Subsequently, we’ve developed a lot of weird stuff and are now working on more strategy games, and more casual games. I also forgot to mention Lost Island, which is probably our biggest casual game, but Raid is our most successful product.
Lessons learned from previous projects
GameRefinery: I think that’s always a very interesting trend in game development. Not too long ago, someone said, “If you’re good at one category, then double down and do something else.” Is that right?
Nicholas Day: Exactly. For one thing, you get tired of one category, and if you tell us to make another strategy game, that can be exhausting. We love strategy games, but we also want to spread our wings and try different things. Also, we’re a big company with multiple studios, so each studio can try different things. We also work with sister studios, for example, the one I work with the most is the studio in Kharkov, Ukraine, where we have 600 people, because we have experience scattered across different studios and we can lean towards more studios. If we start a new category, we usually don’t start from scratch; we ask, “What works best for you guys? What do you think won’t work in this project?” We can learn a lot of lessons from previous projects.
The Raid: Shadow of Mordor
GameRefinery: The Raid: Legends of Shadow is a classic turn-based RPG with very good quality graphics and a very simple experience that makes it easy for users to understand the gameplay. In fact, Star Wars: Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Marvel Commando are RPGs that have done well in Europe and the U.S. Nicholas, I don’t know how much you can talk about, but obviously this is a growing category at the moment.
NIcholas Day: That’s right, some people have even said, “This project is dead,” how many years has it been since Call of Cthulhu was released? Marvel Commando was also very successful, and Star Wars: Legend of the Galactic Heroes was a hit at the time. I think it’s strange sometimes in the market, when we entered the market, a lot of people’s opinion was “there’s no room for turn-based RPGs to grow”, and I think that’s very true, when we made Raids, there were a lot of Asian turn-based RPGs on the market.
We were very invested in, “We’re going to make a turn-based RPG for Diablo 3 fans,” or, “If you like Dragon Age Inquisition and don’t like cartoon characters, this is what we’re going to do.” It almost seemed like a trap at the time, because the category was niche and didn’t have broad appeal, and we were a little nervous that even though we did the project, there were still people saying, “I hope it has users and I hope they like the game.
GameRefinery: Yes, it’s really a niche category, it has to be said, but the team of heroes in the game is so unique and the fans talk about things in such a way that if you look at the handheld market as a whole, very few games like this get this much buzz, and even now, the game is still very appealing.
Nicholas Day: Yes, the people who love it love the game so much, just like our art and planning team, we tried other iterations, maybe we’ll go a little bit lighter, which we’re not going to do today, I think it’s still playing to our strengths right now.
This is actually the first game that is really fully owned by our game director, who used to be the art director and is from the visual design field. The team he built and the passion behind it is the guiding light for the development of this game.
How do you balance the growing number of characters?
GameRefinery: What I find more interesting is that the game is getting deeper and deeper, like the camp system, there are 10-12 camps in the game and more new heroes keep popping up, which is good retention mechanics. With so much stuff you guys are releasing, there will be more content for newcomers, are you guys a little nervous about doing that, after all it will make the anticipation for the next content higher?
Nicholas Day: Honestly, we weren’t sure if there were enough heroes, because that’s the tradition of RPGs, like how many heroes does Call of Cthulhu have? We did more than four times as much content as they did, and even when we started, we mentioned that we didn’t need 1,200 heroes because it would make too much content, and then we went ahead and did it anyway.
Now we’ve launched 700 heroes in some markets, we don’t think 300 characters is enough, we think players are consuming them very fast and now we face tough decisions every time we add a new hero and we’re on a very tight production schedule because the more you add, the better the feedback from players. Finding the balance between that and then continuing to add heroes is viable. Each hero has a unique role and they have enough room to play in the game, but of course it’s an ongoing challenge.
GameRefinery: In the Raid games, if you are fortunate enough to reach multiple of the same legendary heroes and level up to the highest level, you will have more advantages later in the game. Many of the best team setups are consistent, and some combinations can complete levels quickly. However legendary heroes are hard to get on their own, let alone having two of the same legendary cards, which is especially good for big Rs.
Sometimes we can think about these issues later, but we always feel that there’s enough content, we have the core feature set, we want to focus on online operations, do systematic content, and then that’s the end of it. We didn’t want to do that because we felt it was important to balance the development of new features and add entirely new ways to play.
GameRefinery: I guess you still have challenges because the game has been released for a long time and there are players who have topped out and are bored with the old content. With new players downloading the game every day, you don’t want to lose old players or have new players abandon the game, so you have to balance the late game content, but you’ve done a great job with marketing. Of course, not all players want to collect all 700 heroes.
Nicholas Day: It’s true that not all heroes are good and not all heroes are noticed, some heroes are more popular in specific scenarios. You also get some low-level heroes, and some heroes are better at different stages of the game. This is a real challenge, and every time a new player enters, someone will say, “I’ll never collect those heroes.
Making sure that players have a satisfying experience across multiple stages, I think the early stages of the game are satisfying, and if they’re advanced players, there’s a ton of things to do later on, and some of the challenges I our current focus is to make sure that we’re focusing on mid-level players, which are those users who are just past the newbie stage, who know what they’re doing and have enough content to consume, but also to make sure that they don’t feel lost in the a lot of content. We’re always improving the hands-on experience and making sure that anything new we add is quickly accessible to new players.
The future direction of the game’s operations
Nicholas Day: One of the things we’re doing now is focusing on when do we stop feature development and when do we start operating online? There are many types of online events on the market now, and even some games have released material that is bigger than the game itself.
What we’re currently doing is focusing on developing more tools and automation for game planning, not going to do procedurally generated content, but building these tools so that you can do a deeper, more engaging online campaign experience that gives players more depth and freedom, but at the same time, these things can’t be done in six months or a year. In the past, one of our game planners approached the R&D team and said he had a cool idea, and then we started from scratch. Now we don’t do that anymore, instead we build internal tools that allow us to continue to do that. If you’re a gamer, you might think that some content takes many years of development, but in reality, it only takes 3 weeks, and that’s our dream.
Plarium Play for cross-platform
GameRefinery: To ask a specific question, this game started out as a handheld game, but now it’s also coming out as a page-based game? Did you do this because you started out as a page-based game?
Nicholas Day: Actually, there is no page version, we made the PC client, which is Plarium Play, and we’re thinking about rebranding and rebranding. The platform, we initially made it for handheld games and then we released Raids on Plarium Play, and it’s very interesting that the PC platform has a different and very different player base than the handheld platform.
Even from our perspective, what we were trying to understand was what would happen if the game was released on PC first instead of handheld? Basically, PC players are more engaged, they play longer per game, have higher LTV, and on the Plarium Play platform alone, this segment accounts for 30% of the PC client, which is incredible. I think the PC platform Raid players are very hardcore users, they put in 19 hours a day to complete all the activities, they are very enthusiastic and turn up the graphics quality to the highest level.
We’ve also released some third-party games and there’s a lot going on right now, and it might be more interesting to see if that trend continues next year as we release more games on this platform, but it’s been an eye-opener for us, and these users are so engaged.
GameRefinery: Finally, let’s talk about Mech Arena, a real-time 5V5 shooter that doesn’t seem to have anything in common with Raids, does it?
Nicholas Day: I think that might be the case. There are some boring things on the back end that you don’t see or notice as players, like the way we do promotions in the game store. But in terms of gameplay, they don’t actually have anything in common.
I also don’t think the new game is as high quality as The Raid, because that’s how it was originally designed, and we’re going to make more games, and if you go to the character details, you’ll see that some of them used to be among The Raid. That’s one of the strengths of our studio, and I think when you start seeing the marketing campaigns, when you see our commercial videos, it’s like, “This team did The Raid, it’s very good. In terms of actual gameplay, the two teams are actually working in parallel, Mech Arena has been in development for many years and started almost at the same time as Raids.
